tv News Al Jazeera October 18, 2013 12:00pm-12:31pm EDT
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welcome to al jazeera america. i'm del walters. here are the stories that we are following for you. congress is turning its focus back to the budget. now the whole new deadline they face. the president set to name a new head of homeland security. and the syrians pushing lebanon, and an already fragile economy towards the breaking point. ♪ well now that the federal government is back in business, congress and the white house are looking forward. the house and senate are working on a budget plan while the
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president tries to move forward with other issues including immigration. libby casey us live from washington, and the deal calls for congress to come with a long-term budget plan by mid-december. are we keeping our fingers crossed? >> that's right. it will be co-chaired with [ inaudible ] and congressman paul ryan. what they bring to the table is a lot of baggage as they themselves admitted yesterday. >> chairman ryan knows i'm not going to vote for his budget. i know that he's not going to vote for mine. we're going to find the common ground between our two budgets that we can vote on, and that's our goal. >> our goal is for the good of american people to get the debt under control, do smart deficit reduction and do things that we
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think can grow the economy and get people back to work. >> the most ambitious would be to try to find over a trillion dollars in the next few years. but they are expected to take a much more modest approach, and just look for twice handle these cuts that are going to kick in in another round as soon as 2014 starts. we will be watching to see what ideas surface. >> libby most people believe that the president won this latest stannoff, but did he win any allies. >> well republicans go into this fight with a little more strength than you expect because they are much more comfortable with the cuts than democrats are. democrats really want the cuts
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rolled back, so republicans win on that front, but the president does feel like they have gained some momentum. democrats were able to stay incredibly unified in the battle over the last couple of weeks. and mitch mcconnell said pushing things to the brink is off of the table. of course, senator ted cruz told abc news yesterday that he is willing to do whatever it takes to try to defund the federal healthcare law. >> what i continue to do is continue standing with the american people to work to stop obamacare. because it isn't working. >> so he said if that includes trying to deal with this default issue, he said he is not ruling it out. >> libby thank you. the budget crisis is already
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having an effect on the military. the brass saying that budget reductions to the defense department makes the army too small, jeopardizing their ability to even fight one war. those familiar with military budgets say the army is just crying wolf and ignoring the white house 2012 strategy that calls for smaller more agile forces. and president obama is set to announce his choice for the next homeland security director, the president is expected to nominate jeh johnson this afternoon. he played a key role in lifting the ban on gays and lesbians in the military. if confirmed he will succeed janet napolitano who left the position last month. the bay area rapid transit
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system workers are on strike again. lisa bernard has the details. >> reporter: most computers are pretty frustrated this morning that bart and its unions couldn't find a compromise. many of the people are on this bridge in bumper to bumper traffic. others are taking ferries and buses or working from home if possible. computers this morning say simply they are fed up. and of course it is not just bart riders who are impacted by this strike. many others who compute by car every day now have to share the road with many more people, making for a much longer commute to and from work today. still at odds are the two sides over pay and benefits and work rules. they were very close on the economic points. bart has offered a 3% pay
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increase every year for the next four years, but what the two sides could not agree on are these work rules, rules such as bart's desire to change a policy where a worker could work four days in a row, for example, then call in six and then on the sixth day get overtime pay. bart also wants to update the technology to this system. the workers say that would take too much power away from them. it's big economic impact on the bay area as we saw in july. it cost this region an estimated $73 million per day, and with no future negotiations scheduled this strike could last longer and cost more. lebanese officials say they will nearly one million syrians
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that have fled to lebanon for safety. >> reporter: if anyone ever had any doubt about the intense if indication of suffering, then take a look at this. garbage all over the place, and no sanitation. this is a makeshift camp. these are very common and so many people here now, so many syrians all over the valley and the rest of this small country outnumbering in some towns the lebanese. and i'll show you this, look. boxes stored in almond trees. washing on the line because it was raining earlier. this place will be a quagmire in the winter. it will be very cold. look at the children. they can't wash. there's no running water.
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their mothers are doing their best to get buy. there's know schooling. they try to smile, but that doesn't really tell the picture because they are putting a brave face on an impossible situation. not only that, there is social tension. a tension that is getting bigger by the day. we started our report at the place where they register as refugees. more than a thousand people a day in lines to register as refugees. this is the valley where in some towns syrians now outnumber the lebanese. when the war began, these people were welcomed, but not anymore. >> translator: sit down and give them all of your lies a lebanese taxi driver tells this woman who says she suffered outright hostility. >> translator: when we come here they insult us. isn't it enough that someone told me we deserve worse than
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chemical weapons. >> reporter: and another coup and a sign of how desperate survival has become. it's the end of the eid holiday when families should be together. a passport, an id, can mean a bag of fresh beef, but a growing number of people no longer qualify for food handouts. this mother is one for them. >> translator: i have been standing here for hours trying to get a peace of meat. my child has a fever. >> reporter: then a man trying to drive through the queue represents his anger at the roadblock. by the end of the day this donated meat will feed around 4,000 families, but it isn't enough. >> we try our best. we told these people to wait
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until the end of the day. if we have meat left, we'll get it. >> reporter: most of these people return to houses without running water and rent they can't afford. >> translator: her and her daughter are sick. i force her to get up today. if she's sick, we all have a problem. we're the only problems who can take care of the children. >> reporter: but at least they have a roof over their heads unlike hundreds of thousands in these makeshift settlements they are helplessly inadequate, and the dryness will soon be replaced by wind and snow. it is a place that once had promise for those who escaped war, but it is becoming a living hell. what prospects do they have?
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no one here has any hope. and how can anyone find any hope in such a forlorn situation. when you look at the children, a generation lost as so many people say with very little to look forward to. and let me take you past this tree where there's recommend innocence of a suitcase the people have fled with, and trying to get buy. and here, doing their best to try to live some sort of normal existence, they put some rock down to try to avoid the whole trail of mud, and it leads this way into what is living accomodation. would you believe it, a family of more than six trying to sleep in this space. you look at it, they try to keep it orderly, there is even a television set for some level of normality, and to keep in touch with what is going on back home.
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but unless something is done very soon in lebanon, this situation with the onset of winter, will make things, well, near catastrophic for these people. saudi arabia is refusing to take its seat on the un security council. it was elected to serve a two-year term as a non-permanent minister. but it says the council is quote incapable of resolving world conflict, say it has failed syria. uganda is on alert after a report of an attempted terrorist attack. the man you see in the black shirt now lives sew mollia. you can see the people start
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running when the gunmen open fire. coming up on al jazeera america, the search for prisoners who escaped from a florida prison, and how they made their get away has a lot of officials down there on alert. and a lot of americans dream of owning a home. the bizarre credit problem that has turned one man's dream into a nightmare.
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welcome back to al jazeera america, i'm del walters. here are your headlines. this just in to al jazeera, tom foley has died, foley was a democrat from washington state, he also served as u.s. ambassador to japan under the clinton administration and serving during the first term of george h.w. bush. lawmakers are now looking ahead at the budget. a proposal is expected in
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mid-december. and president obama is expected to name a new head of homeland security today. his pick is said to be former pentagon attorney, jeh johnson. the eu says it will give $95 million to lebanon to help with the syrian refugees there. officials say they just can't house and feed that many people. do you know what your credit score is? it's something that a lot of people don't think about until it is too late and they try to buy a home or a car. >> credit scores are very fragile. you may think you are an excellent credit risk, but the slightest hiccup could low ur your score. you probably didn't even realize unpaid parking tickets or
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overdue library books will cost you big time. every year this man would park his car here. >> my time would expire at 7:00, and at 7:02, i would come out and he had written a ticket at 7:01. >> reporter: he racked up more than a thousand dollars in traffic tickets. >> i thought, you know, the worse-case scenario, i would have trouble registering my car in d.c. which i wasn't planning on doing any time soon, and i was wrong. >> reporter: omar was wrong, because registering his car was the least of his problems. last winter he went to a loan officer to apply for a mortgage.
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he believed his credit score was strong. >> my credit score dropped a little over a hundred points because of the parking ticket. >> reporter: unpaid parking tickets are considered debts by the government that receives them. when they can't collect, they turn it over to a collection agency. >> typically three to six months before something like that would appear on a credit report. at that point it's the presence of that unpaid collection that really has a negative impact. >> one late payment can hurt your credit score by as much as 50 or 100 points. i know that comes to as a shock to a lot of people. so even small bills like library bills or parking tickets really do need to be handled. >> due to this experience i
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definitely pay more attention to everything with my credit. the neighborhood i was originally looking at, the prices have gone up significantly in the last three months. >> so dell, i hope you don't have any unpaid parking tickets. >> guilty as charged. so how bad can bad get. >> if you don't treat them it is treated like an unpaid bill. payment history is 35% of your total credit score. so very serious stuff. >> just when i got done paying those student loans -- >> when you parked at the keg parties and all of that. >> yes. thank you very much. here is another impact of this month's stalemate in
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washington, thompson reuter saying people pulled $43 billion out of money markets last week. those money market funds put cash and short-term securities like u.s. treasuries, so worried investors pulled out. realtor website zillo says housing prices aren't rising as much as they were. more homes are coming on the market and that keeps prices down. and investors with deep pockets are pouring more money into startups, especially technical firms. a massive manhunt is
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underway for two convicted murders who literally walked out of a prison in florida. someone filed fake documents with a florida clerk. the clerk then sent the paperwork to the corrections department to release the inmates. >> very dangerous, and they are actively being sought by every law enforcement agency in the state of florida. i have never seen anything like this. you have to give them an a for being imaginative and effective. >> one of the convicted murders was freed three weeks ago, and the other was let go ten days ago. a federal air marshall has been grounded for aledged inappropriate behavior. police say he used his cell phone to take pictures under
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women's skirts as they boarded a plane. the they issued a statement saying . . . coming up on al jazeera america, that massive fire fight in australia, around 100 wildfires are raging across the country. the details are straight ahead. and you can become this, an action figure. where people are going to print out the mini mes straight ahead. together unexpected voices closest to the story, invite hard-hitting debate and desenting views and always explore issues relevant to you.
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well everyone is now back to work at the centers for disease control, but two-thirds of the staff were furloughed for 17 days. earlier i talked to the cdc's director, tom friedman, i asked him if the country was in danger because of the furlough. >> we're also allowed to bring people in to address imminent threats to health. the challenge was we couldn't track what was happening as intensively as we do. >> is a salmonella not considered to be imminent. >> food-born outbreaks were one
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way are track. >> so i go back to the question, was it a mistake to layoff those people and consider them nonessential in the first place? should they have been sent home, knowing that terrorism is a major concern, it may have been something worse than a salmonella outbreak? >> it was a mistake to shut the government. once that mistake was made, we did everything we could to protect the public's health legally. we kept things going the best we do, but it was not ideal. threats didn't shut down, so our ability to track them, respond to them, were ung mined. and now we're back to work getting caught up. ♪
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i'm meteorologist dave warren. well, we will start in australia today, the satellite shows there is practically no clouds around, it's what is happening at the surface that is a big concern. there are some huge fires there. at least 90 fires right around sydney, and the problem is the wind is gusting at over 90 miles an hour. 90 fires with at least a third of them still out of control. watching that situation closely. you can see the smoke, ash, and fire going right over sydney. this is smoke and ash from all of those fires, and clearly scene from the satellite picture. a lot of the darker gray colors are fires. so we're watching that situation
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closely. as far as the country goes, denver just climbed above the freezing mark, but this area coming from the north. nice there yesterday, but today temperatures are about 15 degrees colder, and now western kansas and colorado seeing some light snow. right there is a winter weather advisory, but the bluish color, it's a freeze watch is issued, they issue this once per season and tonight looks to be the night, because tomorrow morning it will be very cold there. a little farther north we're getting another shot of cold air. look at sunday, 41 for a high temperature in minneapolis. cold air is in place but it is dry on monday and tuesday of next week, and low temperatures into the upper 20s.
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so that will be for the start of the workweek. the weekend looking to be fairly nice here, but not everywhere across the northeast. a few showers could be moving through the great looks. it's dry along new jersey and along the coast. there will be heavier rain there over the lakes, but does not move east. new york today is dry, up to 68, 68 tomorrow, 63 on sunday. and by monday and tuesday climbing into the upper 60s, trying to get close to 70. so it does get a little warmer at the start of the workweek. so that's what we are looking at across the country. people are getting to see some personal items from one of
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america's most celebrated presidents today. some of jfk's items are go up for auction in dallas, texas on november 23rd, one day after the 50th anniversary of the late president's death. you can view the items online as well. and here is an interesting idea for your christmas shopping, we think. how about an action figure of yourself. there's a supermarket in britain that is offering just how to do it. and here is how it works. it takes about three minutes to scan your body, reading the colors and your shape. >> it picks up details such as belt buckles, shoe detail, wedding rings, and all of the detail of the color. so our printer recognizes 6
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million colors, and that allows us to print an amazing product, screaming quality and affordable price. >> a dell doll does not sound too nice. after eight hours you can pick up an 8-inch figurine of yourself. no. that's it for watching al jazeera. i'm del walters. "the stream" is next. as we check the numbers in wall street, an indication that things are getting back to normal. the dow is down just 5 points. that means wall street is now focusing on things like it used to, like earnings reports which are due out there time of year.
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you can check us out 24 hours a day at aljazeera.com. i'm del walters in new york. we're back at the top of the hour. >> hi i'm lisa fletcher and you're in the stream. some native americans drive more than 100 miles to cast a ballot and they're fed up . voting, it is essential to our democracy. but some native americans in montana say they don't have equal access. they filed a lawsuit against county and state election officials asking for satellite voting on their reservations to begin 30 days prior to elect
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